Dreaming New Mexico
Dreaming the future can create the future. Envisioning a sustainable world is a necessary first step toward realizing it. Going local in the years to come is a matter of survival. What would a regional food-shed economy that’s based on local jobs, healthy food, social equity, eliminating hunger and restoring the environment look like? Dreaming New Mexico, a Bioneers project, has created a future localized food-shed map to create a framework for transformation at the state level.
“So often those of us involved in social change feel compelled to be in a mode of resistance of trying to stop bad stuff from happening, that we do not actually step back and ask what would success look like. Mostly we settle for what we can get or what is politically expendable, but what do we really want? Dreaming can be a transformative process. In a sense they are dreams, in a sense they are scenarios but the bottom line is that they are doable, not fantasies, they are completely pragmatic and reality based.” ~ Kenny Ausubel, Bioneers co-founder and DNM co-project director.
“DNM began as a refuge a chance to step back and consider the limits we have placed on our sense of possibility. The dream has these themes:
“First there is our cultivated home and that is identifying your agro-ecoregion.
“The second is food-sheds, the human conservation-based economy. One of our dreams is to create by celebration and by education a food-shed that has a sense that local is more reliable and more trusted food because it is your local friend. It is more than cash and less likely to disappear through globalization.
“The third is food security, in a much larger sense than just stopping terrorism from putting bacteria in your food, and that is to preserve the natural capital of the land to be able to have enough good food for everyone and have healthy farms that are not destroying the natural capital.
“The fourth is fair trade because people are not going to give up things like chocolate, coffee and mangoes, etc. So we have to decide how much we want to be self–sufficient and how much we want to import. But now we can add a morality to the importing and exporting of our food. One way to define fair trade is: receive from others as you would give unto them to give them a good life”… Peter Warshall, renown biodiversity expert and DNM co-project director.
